On Point LIVE! In California: The Latino Vote

This week we’re headed to Southern California – to Santa Barbara for a special On Point LIVE! with member station KCLU. We’re celebrating KCLU entering its third decade of serving the California coast from its home at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

The show will be recorded in front of a live audience on Friday, January 22 from 7-8 PM PT. Those of you who can’t make it will hear the broadcast on Monday, January 25 at 11 AM ET.

For the hour we’ll be digging into the new Latino plurality in California. Last summer, Latinos officially surpassed non-Latino whites as the largest racial/ethnic group in California. They now make up 38.6 percent of the state’s population. Demographically, California has arrived where other states around the country are heading.

We’ll look at the significance of this milestone for California and the nation with Roberto Suro – longtime thinker and writer on immigration, now the Director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California; Dolores Inés Casillas – professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at the University of California Santa Barbara and author of “Sounds of Belonging,”; and Jon Christensen, editor of Boom: A Journal of California.

We won’t be able to take listener calls during the hour. We do want your questions and comments. What does a Latino plurality mean for California? What does our growing Latino population mean for the country, in terms of culture, economy, politics and how the U.S. evolves in this century?

Please send us your questions and comments now. They will inform our conversation in Santa Barbara, and maybe make it onto the show! Thanks from all of us at On Point.